CHAPTER
1: TOWARDS ZIONIST MADE DISASTERS
My father, then mother, immigrated to
Palestine, and I was born there ,within
the zionist colony of Tel-Aviv, on the 3rd of July, 1934.
Both
parents were Polish people of jewish background. The birth certificate of my
father - hand written in Polish - states that he, Srul Marchewka, was born on
the 26th of October, 1904. His father, Yankiel Marchewka, who was a poor and
illiterate miller's labourer, was then 24 years old. They lived in Eastern
Poland. That's all I know about my grandfather. I know nothing about my
grandmother, or any other member of my father's family. All of them, as well as
all of my mother's family ,would be murdered by Hitler's fascists during the
2nd World War. Four years youger than my father my mother, Chaya ,too came from
eastern Poland.
Shortly
after their wedding in Poland during 1931 my mother succeeded in persuading my
father to follow the zionist propaganda call to go to Palestine. She wanted
to explore the prospects of settling
there. My father arrived in Palestine on a tourist visa during 1932, and my
mother joined him a year later. Both of them had been victims of the zionist
propaganda motto of lies which attracted them to immigrate to Palestine,
namely, that Palestine was a "land without people for a people without
land".
Palestine,
the homeland of the Arab people of Palestine, was then at the early stages of a
popular armed rebellion against the encroaching zionist settlers, as well as
against the British authorities, the rulers of Palestine. The Palestinians
fought for an independent Arab Palestine, but my newly arrived parents were not
aware of this reality. The zionist propaganda machine presented the Arab
insurrection as "criminal attacks by armed gangs", and the fanatical
zionists (Jabotinsky's followers) escalated their terror attacks against the
civilian population of Arab Palestine simultaneous with the maligning of them.
As
for my parents, they could have, perhaps, found another alternative as they
would have been regarded as ideal settlers by any standards of any immigration
country. Young , healthy and skilled
(father was a qualified electrician, and mother was a qualified dressmaker)
they would have done well in the USA, Canada, Australia etc. At the very least
they would have had the minimum security and peace which eluded them in the
zionist colony of Palestine. Newcommers to Palestine they could not even
imagine the terrible disaster which would befall them soon in Palestine. It
would overwhelm the lives of the three of us.
Following
my birth my parents' rented bedsitter
in Tel-Aviv became crowded, and my father would make extra efforts to
earn more money so as to pay the rent for a bigger flat for us. He had a job as
an auto-electrician in a Jaffa workshop, alongside Arab workmates, and he could
not afford to loose even a single day's work. So , he continued to work even during
the Arab general strike in Palestine, when the streets of Jaffa were full of
angry Palestinian protesters who denounced both the zionist settlers-invaders
and the British authorities.
My
father had a second job, as a cinema
operator at night in a Tel-Aviv movie theatre, but his main job was in that
automobil workshop in the neighboring Arab city of Jaffa. During the couple of
years that he worked there he developed good relations with his Arab workmates,
and I still have the photoes which testify to that. All of which led him to conclude that nothing wrong would
happen to him, despite the pleas of my mother that he should stay at home on
that fateful day in April, 1936. On that day he was stabbed at his back on his
way home. He was severely wounded, and from then on would spend years in
various hospitals until his death.
Left
with a baby in her arms, and with no one to turn to for help, my mother was in
absolute panic. The Histadrut, the zionist organisation that has a
"Department for Trade-Union Affairs", to which my father was
affiliated as a paid member, was indifferent to her plight and ignored all her
pleas for help. So shocking was that indifference that it is still embeded
vividly in my memory, although I was then no more than two years old. I remember her holding me in one arm while
banging the doors with her free hand. Those were the doors of the then Histadrut headquarters at Brenner
Street, Tel-Aviv. I remember her screaming and crying when none of the doors
would open for her.
When
all her attempts to get help from the zionist authorities failed my mother
turned to her own self reliant skills as a dressmaker for rich housewives, and
with me, her toddler in tow. I remember myself on the floor next to her while
her feet on the sewing machine's pedal moving endlessly up and down. I did not
like it but I had to put up with it and with the impatient mother she had
become. By the time she would finish her long working day my mother had very
little energy left in herself, and much less love for anybody.
I
began going to school as a 6 year old, just as the 2nd World War began. By then
we moved out to a rented room closer to the centre of Tel-Aviv, so that I could
walk by myself to school each morning, allowing mother to go to work and return
home according to the requirements of her dressmaking jobs.
It
was a zionist school, of course, that I went to, but at that early stage of my
life I was completely and blissfully unaware and ignorant of what was happening
to me. So, I enjoyed going to school as it provided me with plenty of
opportunities to make friends and have fun at the school yard. Friday was the
day I liked most at school as it consisted of school ceremonies ( the real
meaning of which I began to grasp only some 30 years later). Thus, for example,
at the centre of the school ceremonies was the "Blue-and-White"(the
colours of the zionist flag) tin box - a money collection box - on which the
map of Palestine (as well as the Kingdom of Jordan, then Transjordan) was
printed in blue and white. Presiding over all the school ceremonies was the
decorated large photo of T. Herzl, the founder of political zionism.
For
my mother Friday, every Friday, was bad news. The last day of an exhausting
working week it also marked the beginning of a hectic Saturday when the
washing, cleaning, preparation of meals etc. had to be done by herself, and
with primitive tools. There was hardly any time left for herself, or even for
having some rest before the start of another punishing week, beginning Sunday
morning. Which is why Friday nights were the nights I feared most. No matter
what I did there was no escape from her fury. So I became her regular punching
bag. So much did her violence against me become a regular feature that both she
and myself regarded it as her expressions of her motherly love.
Of
course, being the permanent victim of mother's aggression resulted in the
deterioration of my performance at school. The teachers complained to my mother
about my bad handwriting, for example, for which they punished me too , which
in turn brought on me more punishment from my mother. I vividly remember the
tense and sombre expression on my mother's face when she bent over one day, as
I was scribbling my way in my school's notebook. I heard her scream then felt
an acute pain in my trembling fingers. She had hit the tiny right hand palm of
her 7 year old son so hard that even the pencil I was holding between my
fingers was broken in two and my fingers were bleeding.
The
year 1941 was the time when the 2nd World War was getting closer to Palestine.
Bombers of the fascist Italian air force appeared on Tel-Aviv's, sky and they
dropped some bombs on the city. It was more than enough to strike panic in my
mother's mind. Terrified, as the warning siren would begin to yell, she would grab
me in her arms and rush to the nearest air shelter. As if this was not enough
the horrible news began to reach us from Nazi occupied Europe. The news from
Nazi occupied Poland was very bad: mass murder, deportations, concentration
camps etc. The news trickled very slowly, because of the zionist censorship,
but every day brought more worrying news for my mother. By 1942 my mother
turned into a very shorttempered and distressed person. She needed love, and
she was looking for a man to share her problems as well as her dreams with.
Being
34 years old and a rather beautiful woman mother was looking for a new partner
to share her life with. The lover she eventually found would be my stepfather.
His name was Moshe Apelstein, and he
was a big man who looked to me rather ominously as the wrong father figure for
me. However ,I wanted my mother to be happy, and I did not object to his
relationship with my mother, yet I was worried that he might rob me of the
little affection I have managed to snatch from my mother every now and again.
He did turn out to be much worse than just a robber of love, as he would soon
become my mother's tormentor too , on top of his hostility to me.
By
the end of 1942 we moved out to the country town of Rehovot, some 30km south of
Tel-Aviv. One the earliest zionist settlements in Palestine it was a sleepy
little town, at the heart of the zionist colony's citrus growing region. I
would live there until my conscription to the Israeli army in 1952.
Upon
our arrival in Rehovot I began the 3rd year at the local elementary school. My
mother did not waste time setting up herself as an independent dressmaker. She
rented a small shop close to the town's centre,and she divided it by curtain
into two halves : the back half would be our home, the front would be a ladies'
dressing shop. The "residential " part was further divided by her
into three : one third for the sewing machine, one third for the beds, and one
third for the kitchen. The toilet was outside, at the backyard of the building.
My
mother was very proud of her new "independent" status. She even gave
a name to her shop with a front big sign proclaiming it : "The Fashion
Salon".
If
my mother needed any help to completely abandon her working-class origin then
her lover was just the right man for the job. Born into a family of
jewish-Polish merchants he was trained to carry on with the merchant-traders
tradition., and he never stopped boasting about it. Worse still, he never
stopped reminding my mother of his "superiority" over her poor family
background. It was he who was behind the idea of the shop, luring her into it
by "assuring" her of
financial success.
Mother
was now working 7 day a week, and she would stop only for preparing meals,
cleaning, and going to sleep. There was only one moment of consolation for her,
and it occurred once a week, when she counted, late into the night, the money
earned. At such moments I could notice the glee in her eyes as she stretched
the wrinkled paper money, then counted it, then spit into it (for good luck)
before burying it deep into her handbag. Her ambition, so she confided to me,
was to save enough money to buy a home for us.
As
for myself, I adopted rather quickly to my new social environment. The only
thing that really worried me was mother's refusal to let me join the local
children's street gang. But I did anyway despite her threats and the
punishments that followed. She even tried to put me under some kind of
"house arrest", but I would sneak out all the same. Her fear was that
her only child would turn into a "street child" instead of growing
into a well behaved "respectable person".
As
for my mother's lover he increasingly became a regular visitor, and he made
himself her business adviser too. Only when she fell pregnant to him did we
move out of the shop to live - all three of us - in a rented room in a nearby
street. The room was part of a two bedroom flat which we shared with another family.
It was early 1947 and I was in my last year of elementary school.
In
the town of Rehovot the end of World War 2, like the war itself, was hardly
noticed. Dominated as it was then by citrus groves owner
"aristocrats", Rehovot preserved its conservative, pre-zionist way of
life. The grove owners were the sons of the founders of the town, namely, of
jewish- Russian background whose settlemets in Palestine were financed by the
Rothschilds of France following the model of French colonies elsewhere. They
were not political zionists, and they had no plans for the establishment of a "Jewish State" in Palestine. One
of their leaders, the old citrus groves owner, Moshe Smilansky, who was also a
writer, openly opposed the hierarchy of political zionism in Palestine.
Big
storm clouds were gathering swiftly all over Palestine during 1947, and Rehovot
would become a civilian and military center for the zionist drive to invade and
occupy southern Palestine. The zionist hierarchy ordered a political and terror
campaign against the British authorities in Palestine so as to force them to
hand over to the zionists the entire state apparatus of Palestine.
Simultaneously with terror campaign against the British the zionists carried
out a systematic terror campaign against the Arab people of Palestine so as to
ethnic cleanse them by forcing them to flee in panic, abandoning their homes
and belongings to the zionist terror gangs. The zionist dubbed that war then :
the War of Liberation.
Ignoring
the war dangers, and while attending her women clients and their dresses, my
mother, who was by then heavily pregnant with her lover's son, managed to find
the time to look for a block of land in Rehovot where her dreamed home would be
built. So determined was she to implement her home plan that she totally
ignored the ominous signs of the approaching war. When she eventually bought a
small block of land it became almost impossible to register the land
transaction in Tel-Aviv's titles office. Yet she somehow managed to overcome
all the difficulties and come back home safely with a certificate proving her
title to the land.
My
stepfather was very busy too. He was preparing himself to make big money out of
the war situation. He would buy and sell anything illegal: contraband goods,
black market foodstuff, stolen property, an assortment of firearms etc. The
cupboard at our home was full pistols of all kinds, ammunition of all sizes,
and all kinds of blackmarket goods. He was arrested and imprisoned after
criminal convictions several times, and I was sent by my mother to travel to
prison and bring him his homemade food. As if this was not enough for my early
adolescence, I would be requested by my mother to perform the role of nanny
soon after she gave birth to my half brother. She actually threatened to stop
my highschool studies in case I refuse her request. So I did obey her and would
feed and nurse daily her baby while she went to work. It was at the expense of
my own personal needs, but I kept doing the job for a couple of years without
complaining.
The
two, my mother and Moshe Apelstein , were an unmarried couple even after the
birth of my half-brother. Only towards the end of 1948 did they marry and
register as a married couple. However, my mother's real troubles with her 2nd
husband were yet to come. Their first big dispute concerned the building of a
home on the block of land she had bought. She wanted the building to start
without delay, but he refused to give her any money, unless she would agree
that he would become the registered owner of the property. His greatest worry
was that I might inherit the property after his death. This dispute between
them got worse by the day. Whenever the subject would come up he would yell at
her : " I shall build you a tomb, not a home.” He also used violence
against her to intimidate her, and he hit her very hard.
By
the end of 1948 the zionist war was literally on our doorstep. One day, during
an Egyptian air raid on Rehovot, a 50kg bomb was dropped on the house next door
while we were hiding in the stairway entrance of our house. It prompted my
mother to urge her husband to move temporarily to a smaller town nearby where
we lived in a rented house until the war was over.
The
zionist war of ethnic cleansing ,which actually began in 1947 and ended with
the truce agreements of 1949, dispossessed about half the population of
Palestine. They have become refugees , and they and their families still live
in refugee camps because the zionist apartheid regime of Israel won't let go
back to their homeland and homes. When they fled their homes they left behind
not only their homes and orchards but even their personal belongings. All was
looted by the zionist settlers. The most valuable chattle were stolen by the
high ranking zionist officers and members of the zionist hierarchy ; then came
the lower ranks to loot, and to clean up the left overs came the zionist
civilians , particularly zionist traders like Moshe Apelstein, my stepfather.